daily life of a japanese mom

The Umbrella bag/かさ袋

Today, it’s raining. Very cold rain…
In a rainy day, you could find a special stand for the plastic bags at the entrance of the supermarket like this.
You’re supposed to put it on your umbrella during shopping not to drip water drops on the floor. It is used only for that. When you leave the supermarket, you can throw it away in the trash can. (Mottainai!)
One American had said to me before that it looked like a condom for an umbrella. Oh my…I had never thought that way before, but since then every time I put on a plastic bag on my umbrella, I remember that word, and makes me uncomfortable to do it!

Anyway, do you bring your umbrella with you inside the store or leave it in the umbrella stand?

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We have such bags at Kroger supermarket along with entrance umbrella stands.
I don’t feel like anyone uses them. If you leave it in the stand, you forget it. It’s easier just to shake it off outside the door and put in your cart. American grocery carts are huge!
Besides, must of us don’t use umbrellas
consitantly enough. I carry one for campus while it’s raining because I walk all of campus. In just going to the store, I just dash for the door because you can park the car close.

I would also think ‘condom’ privately but not say so! I still have a little bit of a teenage’s mind.

Is it true that people in the West don’t use umbrellas much? and many people don’t own them?
Here in Japan people open up their umbrellas just as soon as tiny drops of rain start falling.
Probably we Japanese should do away with the umbrella bags because they are wasteful but there is one purpose for keeping them.
If we put our umbrellas in the bags, we can protect the commodities in the supermarket from being stained and infected from the dirty drops of rain.
I was at a supermarket a few days ago with an umbrella at hand in a plastic bag and after 10 minutes of shopping around the store when I left the shopping center, I found at the bottom of the bag a mass of brown colored, dirty, and muddy liquid of water.
Then I realized that if I hadn’t wrapped the umbrella in a bag, I would have gotten such amount of contaminated water sprayed on every item around the whole of the store and especially on the buffet-styled foods which we might have bought and brought home and we (other people) might’ve eaten ‘em.
So my conclusion is :
Having umbrella bags might not be a bad idea.

You don’t have to apologize. It was funny!! Just a little bit shocking! I do agree with the governor of Shiga that it’s a little wasteful to have these for one time use. But you’re right, it is very useful. Not a bad thing.

The truth is that most Americans don’t bother too much with umbrellas, because we can always park our car so close to where ever we’ve going.

We’re too lazy to walk anywhere!

Personally, I use an umbrella because I walk everywhere, especially on my school’s campus. I use a cloth bag for my umbrella while I’m in class.

田中さん
ありがとうございます
正直なところ、どう、コメントしようかなぁて考えてたんです（笑）
My husband’s name is also Jiro, so I thought he was teasing me!
I think it’s very dangerous to make the floor wet and slippery. Especially for kids, they always run about the store.

I live in Arizona, it doesn’t rain here! Okay, it rains a little, but not very often. When it does rain everybody is so happy that they walk in the rain without an umbrella. Of course if you work in an office you don’t want to look like a drowned rat after walking in the rain, so then you might carry an umbrella, but I’ve never seen stands or bags to slip over an umbrella, you just shake the umbrella at the door, fold it up, and carry on.

We don’t have that in Malaysia. This is the first time I saw something like that. The Japanese r very creative, indeed!

I used to leave my umbrella outside the shops. Usually, there r supermarket/stores that put small lockers for those who wants to keep their belonging before we enter the shops. That is the normal practise here.

I wonder if someday we will use that. ‘Condom’ huh?..hahaha!

Alternatively, we just leave the umbrella in an ‘umbrella vase’. (a tall cylinder vase just enough to put 4-5 umbrellas).

Hi Nini,
They have a similar umbrella vase in Japan, too.
however, I don’t leave my unbrella there, becasue there are a lot theft these days! Unfortunately, but it’s ture.
These misdemeanor kind of crimes are now increasing and people get uset to it! Very sad…

Im trying to remember where Ive seen an umbrella bag dispenser like this over here…I know Ive seen one distributed at one of the major shopping centres here ^_^ I think its very useful to have eventhough we only use like once ..

You know there are these automatic ones as well. You stick your umbrella in those things, and they’ll put a plastic bag over it in an instant. When I first “discovered” it, I exclaimed in joy like some gaijin!